Ratso Rizzo Republic

Another terribly dated pop cultural reference, but becoming terribly dated myself...

Ratso Rizzo--a character in the movie Midnight Cowboy
--made his name in America in 1969, forty years ago now. Forty years before that, the year was 1929, the year of the stock market crash that ended the "Roaring Twenties" and initiated the Great Depression; all that seemed unimaginably shrouded in the mists of time to the twenty three year old I was then, so the Sixties to a young person today... And as for the Great Depression, well, its place in time for today's twenty three year old equates to 1889 for me at that age, and 1889 was for all practical purposes akin to the Pleistocene for me. Puts things in perspective, doesn't it?

But Ratso is an archetype of sorts, one who may be about to make a reappearance on a wider stage than that upon which he limped back in 1969. Ratso was what in the New York of that era was known as a skell: dirty, smelly, a butt-sniper (as in pick-up-cigarette-butt-from gutter), pickpocket... got it? And, of course, he lived in a squat, and it is there that he pops through the time tunnel to appear on city streets not just in New York, but soon on a coast-to-coast simultaneous appearance tour, leaving the unemployment lines when the checks run out to revert to the hunter-gatherer culture of yore.

Ratso is far more likely to be the avatar of the New and Greater Depression than the Okie or the freight-train-hopping hobo, basically benign figures who appeared at the back door to split firewood in exchange for some three-day-old apple pie and a steamin' cup of java. Ratso don't want no handouts, and those surviving suburbanites who hang their clothes to dry in the back yard now that carbon tax and all has made it impossible to use that big electric dryer for anything other than a giant hamster treadmill, well they'd better hook the clothesline up to the refrigerator circuit if they plan on wearing them again. And they'd better pull up those croquet stakes, and the wickets too, and keep the pets indoors, because otherwise Ratso will set up his own little equivalent of Sonny Bryan's Texas Bar-B-Q pit, and they'll be lucky if he doesn't take Lassie's fur to line his overcoat, or maybe his busted-sole, blown out shoes.

The movie's theme song was perhaps more memorable than the film itself, and fits in with with the psycho-linguistic mind set of the street person:Everybody's Talkin' At Me. Many times, "everybody" consists of any number of voices inside the boom box of the brain, but, for once, no matter how high the thing is turned up, you can't hear it, even though the distortion is present.

How long will it be before the wandering Ratsos begin linking up in groups of three or four, at first lurking in the shadows of shop-windowed streets, then amalgamating into larger groups like the body-snatched out in San Francisco? How long before refugee Ratsos begin turning up in tiny towns, their remaining teeth filed into fangs, the better to tear your flesh with, my dear?

A whole catalog of horror films begins flickering before one's eyes: Night of the Living Dead;I Am Legend; 30 Days of Night... you get the picture, I'm sure.

The Ratso Republic: Nightmare on Main Street.